This Just In: I’m A Harlot, Not An Adulteress! (Aren’t We All) Thoughts On HJR-3 and Me and Not Being a Stinky Christian

In other news, upon further examination it has been determined that “adulteress” was not entirely accurate. Turns out I was only a harlot and that, after more research into Biblical definitions and semantics, I apparently had it all wrong about adultery.

According to the author of a somewhat prominent Christian marriage site I’d rather not link here (hey, it’s a blog, not a newspaper), “modern Christians” completely misunderstand the word “adultery,” and I quote:

Here’s a simple test:

If a married man has sexual intercourse with his single secretary, has he committed adultery?

If you answered yes then you don’t know the definition of adultery.

He goes on to clarify the matter thusly: “The fact is that anyone who has sexual intercourse outside of marriage has indeed committed a sin (harlotry*) but if the woman involved is not a married woman then it is not called adultery.” He also says, citing Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance as his source (“the concordance favored by theologians”), that adultery refers to a specific kind of sexual sin: sexual intercourse with another man’s wife or woman who is engaged to another man. “That’s it,” the pastor-author says. “Nothing else.”

“It is impossible for a single woman to commit adultery.” Hallelujah. Thank goodness I’m a harlot. (Or was a harlot.) Harlot has such a nice ring, doesn’t it?, compared to “adulteress.” Harlot. I like the literary flavor. But wait, no. I was an adulteress and a harlot? Wait, what? Oh, man.

I do subscribe to the following idea asserted on another site representative of Christian thinking on the matter of “sexual sin,” namely that: “God created you with a purpose: To bring glory to Himself in an eternal love relationship with Him.” I love that about God. He’s such a lover. I also buy into the notion that “God invented marriage as a living metaphor for how He desires our relationship with Him to be.” My non-believing husband demonstrates this Ephesians 5 standard of marriage, driving me deeper into understanding of Christ’s complete and sacrificial love for His bride, men and women who follow Him.

25 Husbands, love your wives. Love them just as Christ loved the church. He gave himself up for her. 26 He did it to make her holy. He made her clean by washing her with water and the word. 27 He did it to bring her to himself as a brightly shining church. He wants a church that has no stain or wrinkle or any other flaw. He wants a church that is holy and without blame.

28 In the same way, husbands should love their wives. They should love them as they love their own bodies. Any man who loves his wife loves himself.

That’s the extreme to which my agnostic husband loves his Jesus-freak wife. Lucky me, eh? (And I also realize that the passage goes on to speak in terms of marriage applying to a “man and a woman,” but dude: I know gay and atheist couples loving their spouses in this Christ-like way better than many, many so-called Christian [male] husbands and their [female] wives. Don’t even get me started on the stats of violence and other forms of domestic abuse within Christian marriages.) But, in an article examining the question of why homosexuality, fornication, harlotry and adultery are sin I see clearly now that I really have no business being married. Specifically, this line:

“Homosexuality, fornication, harlotry, and adultery pervert God’s purpose for creating us and destroy the metaphor that represents the Holiness of our Lord Jesus Christ and the sanctified intent of marriage.”

So therefore, dear reader, anyone who has ever had sex outside of marriage—including before marriage, which, according to the Waiting Till Marriage website’s article 4 Cool Statistics About Abstinence in the USA, takes 97% of American citizens out of the running as marriage material—really has no business tying the knot.

Anyone who has ever had sex before marriage—probably most of my high school class and yours—shouldn’t have the right to be married, legally or otherwise. We, all of us, are—or were—harlots, fornicators. We have all, whether in thought or action, perverted the metaphor.

And right now, in Indiana, the handling of a particular piece of legislation singling out same sex couples grieves and infuriates me! When I think of my gay friends who are monogamous and have been in a committed relationship years for more years than my (latest!) marriage, gay friends who are single and more chaste before/outside “marriage” than I was, and more faithful within their unions than I and other Christians who have made poor relationship choices have been, I think this: maybe I am the one who shouldn’t be allowed to marry.

We Christians STINK! Sheesh. We’re such puritans and hypocrites! According to the article “Why Affairs Happen”, in Today’s Christian Woman, “As many as 65 percent of men and 55 percent of women will have an extramarital affair by the time they are forty, according to the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.” And ministry folk? Not great PR/witness there either. “A Christianity Today survey found that 23 percent of the 300 pastors who responded admitted to sexually inappropriate behavior with someone other than their wives while in the ministry.”

And that’s not even accounting for the different “types of adultery” (emotional, mental). Jesus said, after all, that “Anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Por ejemplo: guys from 12 to 102 drooling over barely-dressed young women in just about any television commercial and the February issue of SI, to say nothing of actual porn; women, too, oo-lah-lahing over Don Draper (guilty!) and Adam Levine (again, guilty!). But for some reason, straight-up hetero- gray area impropriety/meta-adultery isn’t as appalling to us church types as homosexual monogamy. Blame the ick factor (<<<compelling NUVO piece from Indy photographer Mark Lee).

It’s not same sex couples being allowed to marry that unravels the fabric of our society, it’s people. Assuming a sex-focused root-of-evil perspective, society has been unraveling for a long time. Remember Thomas Jefferson? Bill Clinton? JFK? If it’s sexual sin we’re fingering as the agent responsible for poisoning our otherwise pure society, then consider the legions of “lustful” senators, presidents, ministers, priests, etc. and other skeezy culprits keeping CNN, FOX News and SNL on the air.

If it’s true that “Homosexuality, fornication, harlotry, and adultery pervert God’s purpose for creating us and destroy the metaphor that represents the Holiness of our Lord Jesus Christ and the sanctified intent of marriage,” then maybe the Speaker of the House should reword the amendment to include language excluding from legal marriage in Indiana anyone who has ever had sex before marriage or outside of marriage. That would be the ideal. What say you, Brian Bosma?

And as long as I have my Bible open to Ephesians 5, I’m going to spend the day lingering on the first portion of the chapter: “Therefore, be imitators of God as dear children and WALK IN LOVE, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to god for a sweet-smelling aroma.”

Reblogged this on The Engledow Chronicles and commented:
I love this post by my friend, Beth Bates. It’s too good not to share.
When you are done reading this, I hope you will wander over and check out her other writings.
Enjoy!

I come by way of Jenni’s reblog. Nice post. It’s interesting how the marital status of the man is irrelevant. It’s only those damn persnickety women that seem to mess things up. You know, with their libidos and all that. The religious sure seem to spend a lot of time and effort analyzing, sorting and cataloging the various types of sin. Sin A > Sin B but Sin C is an abomination. (So don’t order the shrimp.) I think it over-complicates things. Sin is sin, humans are flawed, and life is hard. We should worry less and support each other more.

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